Color and Light
by Assimbya
Summary: Miriam and Abigail endure two very different captivities. Warning for extensive descriptions of imprisonment and mention of canon typical violence.


Miriam woke to light and music, a brief pain like a bee sting. She was lying in a bed, and light was falling upon her from a high window. At first she relaxed, at the clear air, at the warmth of the sunlight, and then she felt the binding at her chest and wrists and ankles and memory came back to her. She had been caught - she had been stupid, reckless, arrogant enough to be caught - but she was not dead yet. She remembered the stiff shape of the body threaded through with knives, and the crime scene photos she had been shown of the other victims, body parts split from one another, fragmented.

She began to strain against the bonds, to fight or look for weaknesses. And then there were gloved hands on her face, her shoulder. "Quiet," came the voice, which she knew, "I am not going to hurt you now."

Miriam stilled. She counted her fingers, her toes. He was so close, close enough that she could hear his breath. She tried to add up the information she had on him in her mind, every tiny detail, as if she were constructing a profile, but details kept slipping away from her, evading her grasp. Her mind and body felt heavy, sluggish, out of her control. There was a blunt, horrifying absence where she knew terror should be.

A low sound, as he moved a chair closer to wherever it was she lay, as he sat down. She could not move her head much, but she could see his knees, his waistcoat, his careful hands folded. "I am going to give you a choice, Miriam," he said, "and I want you to think about it very carefully. You have left me with an urgent problem that I must solve in one way or another. Normally I would not offer someone a choice in such a scenario, but you have been clever and courteous, and I wish to provide you with this dignity."

He paused. Miriam waited, and thought that he was mad in some way she had never read about before.

"Your first choice is for me to kill you - quickly, painlessly, so carefully that you shall not even notice that it is being done. Or, I could let you live, at least for the present, but destroy your ability to identify or incriminate me, should circumstances change and you find yourself again at liberty. I will change or take away any memory you have of finding me, and use various conditioning techniques to ensure that you will not be able to describe me accurately. I have never done this before. While I believe myself able enough to accomplish these aims without destroying your mind entirely, I am not confident in this. I do not know what state you will be in when I finish with you. You may not be able to speak coherently or live independently again. I may in the future need to put you in the position of naming someone else to Jack Crawford in my place, and thus implicate yourself in sending an innocent man to jail for my crimes. I understand that this prospect may be unpalatable for an independent, principled woman such as yourself."

She opened her mouth to speak, but he placed a hand on her wrist. "Don't answer me now. Think about it. I will keep you comfortable until you've made your decision."

He stood and drew the blinds and left her again in dark.

* * *

Abigail thought that she was about to die, at the icy pain which was the knife, at the hot gush of blood from her throat, at the world cascading down around her. She thought, _So this is how it ends,_ with her feet on her kitchen floor, with the empty walls mocking her. She thought, _So I will never be able to leave._

Perhaps it was better this way, that she be drained out and every part of her put to use. Everything which once had been her life had now been boxed up and taken into evidence; her family had been reduced to sensational catch-phrases, types easily recognized and dismissed. And at the same time, all her own attempts to box up her secrets, to build a new life of her own in the wake of her previous life's ruination had unraveled, one after another. What was left for her?

But her body did not hit the floor, not that time.

Arms caught her, and hands pressed at her throat, at this place which once again was opened up and made vulnerable. His fingers did not tremble as he held the wound closed, applying firm, even pressure. In the blood and pain and chill and heat she breathed still, and she did not die.

And she realized her error, her central point of confusion, for Hannibal was not her father. Hannibal fixed the things which he destroyed.

She would not remember what followed, the needle threading through her skin and sealing it up, the jagged knife against the cartilage of her ear. She would never know how long she lay unconscious in the back of the car, while her murderer and savior forced her ear down Will Graham's throat. She would know only waking into blurred sunlight, her body heavy with lack of use. She was in a bedroom, cool and clean and ordered. Her head ached, and the raw flesh upon her throat and where her ear had been stung and strained when she tried to move. But those feelings were familiar, at least in part; at least this time she was not waking tethered to a plethora of medical equipment. The last time, the feeling of it had made her scream and scream.

She realized two things quickly: first, that she was in Hannibal's house and, second, that the door to the bedroom was locked.

* * *

"I want to live," Miriam told him, when he returned and gave her light again, "I want to live, I want to live, I want to live."

* * *

When Hannibal finally opened the door, Abigail was tense with coiled, anticipatory energy. She thought about running, about pushing her way through the crack in the door and fighting, but she did not consider it long, for that was never how she had survived (remember the first time, when the girl screamed and Abigail panicked and she tried to fight her father and he was so angry and hurt and she ended only in bitter, lonely tears, sick with the certainty that she had disrespected the dead girl, caused her to die without dignity). She sat still and tried to keep her mind sharp. She tried calmly to register the fact of her fear. She did not know what he wanted. She did not know what he would do next.

What he wanted, it seemed, was to bring her breakfast - tea and juice and eggs and pastries, no meat anywhere. He laid the tray on the table beside her bed and asked her how she felt. His voice was so solicitous and kind that the sound of it made her cry. She wanted it to be all right. She wanted him to hug her again and tell her that she wasn't a monster, except that she didn't know, any longer, whether that assurance could mean anything from him.

"Everything hurts," she answered finally, "but you know that, I think. Why am I here? Why didn't you kill me?"

Hannibal knelt smoothly down beside the bed and took Abigail's hands. "I didn't want to hurt you, Abigail. But you understand that there was no way for me to protect you any longer. They knew everything. I had to take you away."

Abigail remembered the spray of blood, her limbs softening beneath her. "They think I'm dead?" He nodded. She pulled her hands away from his, reached to touch her jawbone. "And my ear?"

He smiled. "Verisimilitude," he said.

"What will happen to me now?" she asked.

"You'll live with me, at first. Which is what you wanted, yes? Away finally from that hospital. And I will construct a new life for you, somewhere far away from here. When the time comes, we can leave together and begin it." His voice turned gentle. "It is a chance for a new beginning, Abigail."

"But not one without murder," Abigail could hear her voice going shrill. "Are you going to make me help you, too? You always knew - is that why you were kind to me? Because you thought I would be a nice, helpful assistant to you, like I did to my father? Are you going to make me hold them down while you cut out their livers?"

He frowned. "Unless it is for our own safety, I am not going to make you doing anything you do not want to do. But I must ask you to stop shouting, or I will have to keep you either gagged or in the basement, neither of which will be very pleasant."

In response, Abigail knocked over the breakfast tray, shattering his china and leaving eggs and juice splattered across the wood floor.

Hannibal left, and locked the door behind him.

* * *

"Now, look at the light, Miriam," he said, "and focus."

Her hands were going numb with the rope, and the light was making her dizzy. She did not know long she had been his captive. He kept her unconscious much of the time, which left her at once resentful and relieved - resentful that so many hours of her life were being stolen away from her, but relieved that she did not have to find a way to fill those hours, alone within the closed space of her prison. He never left her have light, when he was not with her, and so she could do nothing but lie in the dark and wonder what he might be doing in his absence, who might be dying while she lay there, whether her family and Jack Crawford had given up searching for her yet. Unconsciousness was easier. She easily held out her arm for the needle, now.

But he treated her well. He gave her good food, and enough of it. He helped her walk around the room several times a day, so that she would not lose all the strength in her legs. But her body was still weakening. She had bedsores sometimes, despite his solicitous attentions. She needed assistance getting to the bathroom. She felt ashamed at this, at her own helplessness before him, at the way he saw her body in all its leaking fallibility. He must be used to seeing bodies like this, she knew - murder was a messy thing. But to be weak in front of him made her, definitively and unavoidably, his victim, and she could not bear to think of herself in that company, despite the faustian bargain he had offered and she had accepted.

She did not know if he would ever let her go. She did not know if he would actually spare her life, or if this was all part of some cruel, capricious game.

Miriam looked at the light.

"Listen to my voice. I want you to imagine the moment that you walked into my study. Picture it. Tell me what you see."

She followed his voice and lost the feeling of her body, her sore throat and her hollow ribs. She remembered.

"Now, let us take out our box, from last time - you remember it. Place the memory inside, Miriam, and lock it. Feel the key turning. And then give the key to me."

* * *

Abigail quieted, of course; she had more sense than to keep yelling and throwing things. And so he began even letting her out of the bedroom for brief spans of time, letting her eat with him in the dining room or sit in the living room to read. For most of the time, though, she had to stay locked in. He even bound and gagged her for the first few months when he had guests, and that, she thought, was the worst thing, the indignity of it, waiting for him to let her out. She had watched her father's victims being bound, the way their muscles seized up when they felt the restriction of their movement. To be in the same position herself horrified her.

But he also gave her books to read, and asked her opinions on them afterwards. He discussed the gaps in her education and tutored her personally in the subjects where she felt deficient. When she told him that her father had not cared much for music, he made up a curriculum for her, and watched her face as she listened to each of the recordings in it, smiling when he could tell she was moved. They talked together of the places they would go one day, and Abigail found herself admitting wishes she had never before articulated out loud, things she wanted to try, parts of the world she wanted to see. She knew how parochial her ambitions must sound to him, but he never mocked her for them, and she felt relief and comfort at his respect.

There were screams, sometimes, from beneath the floorboards. She saw him covered in blood. She recognized, as she had before, the taste of the meats he served her. She did not think about who he might be butchering below her feet. She did not ask him. Abigail had learned years before how to avoid speaking such questions, and how to wall off the knowledge of violence cleanly from the rest of her life (how else could she have gone to school with the fat of her father's latest victim still sticking in her throat?).

Sometimes she thought that her ability to avoid thinking about what she knew he did worried Hannibal, as strange as that idea sounded. He tilted his head and looked her with his psychiatrist-gaze and asked carefully open-ended questions. She shrugged and clipped her sentences like a sullen teenager until he stopped. Maybe he wanted her to pour out her own agonies and ethical doubts; maybe he wanted to drink them in, or bond with her over them, use her tears as a way in to drawing her into whatever his own ideology was. She did not let him. She did not give him the opening.

She could not, however, keep from showing him her fear at being arrested for her crimes. She could see that he was using it against her, calculatedly feeding her own terror, but she could not shut off the panic. She kept remembering the red letters painted on her house, Jack Crawford yelling at her over Nicholas Boyle's body. She could imagine a jail cell, a trial, everyone drawing away from her in terror and disgust. And, as she imagined these things, Hannibal would put his hand on her shoulder, or kiss her forehead, or gently rub her back, and the kindness of the touch, the surety that he did not judge or despise her, was so potent that she knew, even if he left the doors to his house wide open, she could not have left.

* * *

He took her out for a walk outside, in a garden. This was such an enormous and unexpected gift that Miriam did not mind being bound and blindfolded in the car there, nor being made to wear a hood and glasses when they arrived. Even from behind the glasses, the sunlight seemed so gloriously bright, the colors of the leaves and flowers so vivid. He held her arm carefully, as though he were escorting an invalid. Which she was, in a sense.

She reached out, hesitantly, to touch one of the flowers. "They're so beautiful," she said slowly, "I'm always so happy when I wake to find that you've brought some for me. It's wonderful to see them still growing like this."

"I'm glad," he told her, "I thought you would enjoy it." She thought he was smiling, but she did not turn to look. She was forbidden to look at his face; whenever she did, he had to have more sessions to wipe out the memory, and each time those were over it was more difficult for her to think even about the simplest things, more difficult for her to use her hands to hold a fork or turn a faucet, more difficult to understand her mind and body as linked. She wanted to remember this day. She wanted to hold onto these colors and keep them with her forever, even in the dark and the hot, white light he used on her.

It was afterwards, when he had taken her back and fed her (she fed herself, mostly, but sometimes she needed his assistance) that he told her he was going to take her arm and give it to Jack Crawford. The words fell in her like a heavy stone; she knew she should feel something about them, but she could not think of what. It had be so long, and he had not hurt her, had not taken any part of her other than her mind. She recalled, then, how lucky she was for that. How she could so easily be laid out in bleeding, shattered pieces.

One arm. She looked at it, stroked her palm and wrist and elbow. This she would give up, like her long-term memory and fine motor control and ethical integrity. And, somehow, she would live with that.

He sat and watched her as she did this, perhaps looking for tears, for grief. He gave her no privacy as she absorbed the weight of her loss. She was accustomed to this. She held out her arm for the needle prick.

She felt no pain, and, when she woke, her arm was gone, and she could not even see the stump for the bandages.

* * *

Abigail saw his basement, once. He instructed her to stay calm, not to scream or panic at what was there. She was not sure she could hold to that promise, but she had been there for months and she had a strong stomach. She wanted to ask him to hold her hand, but didn't, and kept her palms firmly in the pockets of her jeans.

It was unlike anything she saw of her father's, and that terrified her - all the gleaming metal, the body parts separated from one another and displayed in grotesque pieces. _He's not honoring them,_ Abigail thought, and felt a twinge of fury, _he laughs at them, he makes it whimsical, he probably lets their hair and teeth and bones all go to waste._ She closed off the thoughts. That was not her life any longer; she didn't need her father's voice in her ear passing judgment on Hannibal.

She did not scream, when she saw the woman lying there, but she did gasp, a quick, sharp intake of breath in response to the woman's own, the soft rise and fall of her chest in sleep. She could see the clean wound of her amputated arm, close to healed.

Abigail walked over to her, slowly enough that Hannibal could have stopped her if he wanted to look, and looked at her. Light hair, determined features, a thin body covered with a light, flounced dress of the kind Hannibal kept trying to give to her.

Abigail did not ask who the woman was, or what she was doing there, or when she would be killed. She simply reached out and ran her fingertips lightly across her hairline, collarbone, shoulder, down the palm of her remaining hand, which she pressed gently, like a kiss.

And then she turned and told him, "Can we go? I think I've seen enough."

* * *

He did not speak to her, and his silent brusqueness was like a kind of violence as he bound and blindfolded and gagged her, as he piled her into the car and then out of it, as he put her in the deep dark hole and left her there to die. She shivered and cried out, begged him to let her out, promised that she knew nothing, she truly didn't remember, she would never even try to report him for she would have had nothing to say. But his mind was elsewhere, on some other plan to which she was only incidental. She could not reach him.

He closed the earth over her head and there was no more light, no more light needle pricks to lull her to dreamless sleep, the only thing for her to do was wait, in the dark and the chill, for death or for rescue.

* * *

He had been in a good mood, before, giddy with some private joy, but then all was chaos, and Abigail tried to listen and follow and do as she was told, but everything was happening too fast, the thud of a fight, doors slammed open, and then there was nothing but her own panic, and the glass shattering, and Alana's look of betrayal, and horror consumed her, and she could not think and did not think and then he grabbed her, like before, and the old wound opened up again at the pain eased out of her and everything went red.

* * *

Everyone brought flowers to Miriam's hospital room, and their smell and color made her sick.


End file.
